A couple of days ago, one of the participants of the A Piece A Week challenge, showed us an image of her hand bound journal with eco-prints as covers. I had never heard of eco-printing, but being an eco freak I couldn't help but do some research, if and how I could try this method as well. After I stumbled upon
these detailed instructions by Cassandra Tondro, my hands were aching to try it out. As usually, I didn't have more of the suggested supplies and tools than I did. Besides: after the long winter, we still don't have green grass not to speak about colorful leaves or flowers. But today, I found tiny spring flowers during my morning walk with the dog and just had to give this process a try. So I did, what I could with what I had :)
First, I tore some water color paper in smaller pieces using the suggested method: folding it back and forth and dampening the folds.
Then, I soaked the paper in warm water for more than an hours (honestly, I forgot about it).
After that, I arranged the tiny flowers and leaves on one of the pieces of paper (sorry, forgot to shoot a pic), covered it with another piece of paper, put a folded newspaper beneath and on top of the "sandwich" and ... ironed it for a while.
When I could not stand the suspension any more, I stopped ironing and opened the sandwich. Ta-dah! Behold my first ever eco-prints!
An additional plus from the ironing: the prints are almost dry by the end of the process. A minus: need to clean the iron of the black newspaper ink now. Next time, I will put a piece of paper towel on top of the stack :)
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